top(1) is your friend. Also look into lm-sensors to see if your machine's got temp and fan-speed sensors.

At one time my Acer 1410 needed a module to be compiled and loaded at boot so its fans could be controlled, but now that it's older this is no longer necessary. Have you looked at the Ubuntu wiki to see if they've got a page for your laptop? They do for some and it will detail which h/w works and which doesn't, and any needed workarounds. Sometimes it's not updated, though, and the page is for some old version like 11.04.

Might also be worth having a look at /proc/cpuinfo to see what your clock speeds are. The load averages might be high because you're in a low power state, though that would make the high fan speed even stranger.

Madman wrote:EDIT: Firefox settled to 3% again... Then again, I opened the response screen with animated gif's and it's 30% again.

It sounds like maybe you're running with the generic frame buffer display driver (no 2D hardware acceleration). 30% for an animated GIF is really excessive even with the CPU downclocked to 800 MHz unless the CPU is being forced to do all the work without assist from the GPU.

Also, are you absolutely sure it's an animated GIF and not a Flash animation? I do frequently get a GIF/JPG ad at the top, but there's sometimes also a Flash ad hiding down at the bottom.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson